Power Goes Out On Staten Island As Queens Recovers

By SEWELL CHAN and DIANE CARDWELL; Ann Farmer and Sarah Garland contributed reporting for this article.

Published: July 27, 2006

Still reeling from the end of a lengthy blackout in western Queens, Consolidated Edison found itself grappling with a new power failure yesterday afternoon when 16,000 customers on Staten Island lost electricity for several hours.

The latest power failure occurred as the utility and the city braced for a second summer heat wave that could endanger a fragile electrical network in Queens that is still being repaired.

The power failure on Staten Island began at 4:15 p.m. when three overhead lines were damaged -- just 12 hours after Con Ed announced that electricity had been restored to the last customers in the Queens blackout. Around 10 p.m., Con Ed said, power was restored to all of its customers on Staten Island. The term ''customer'' includes residential and commercial buildings as well as households.

Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg canceled plans to visit Queens last night to go instead to the affected areas of Staten Island. ''The good news is the temperature is reasonably cool and we do expect to get everybody back very soon,'' the mayor said last night in a news conference at Dongan Hills.

He took care to distinguish between the power failure on Staten Island, which uses overhead lines, and the blackout in Queens, which relies mostly on underground networks.

''This is a very different situation than existed in Queens,'' Mr. Bloomberg said. ''Here, when a cable is out, they know that everybody downstream is not getting power, so their estimates are very good. In an underground system, there are multiple paths to every house, so they don't have a way of knowing.'' In Queens it took Con Ed four days to correctly estimate the number of customers without power.

Although far smaller and shorter than the Queens blackout, the failure on Staten Island drew a large response from police officers, firefighters and emergency workers and caused confusion in a wide swath of neighborhoods along the northeastern section of the island.

At the Criminal Court building in Stapleton, lights flickered on and off. At Wagner College, a private liberal arts college in Grymes Hill, about 200 students in residence for the summer session were encouraged to go home if they had relatives in other parts of the city, and campus security officers provided emergency lighting. Staten Island Railway trains continued to operate, but with delays of 10 to 15 minutes between Grasmere and New Dorp because of signal problems.

The city's Housing Authority took floodlights, water and portable generators to two developments, the Berry Houses and South Beach Houses, which have a combined total of more than 1,900 residents.

''It's like they plugged in Queens and turned off Staten Island,'' said June Fontana, 51, one of about 40 residents who gathered in a courtyard at the South Beach Houses last night. ''You make the best of it. You get the chance to sit with your neighbors.'' Power was restored to both housing developments around 8 p.m.

Yesterday, the state's Public Service Commission, which regulates major utilities, opened an investigation into Con Edison's handling of the blackout in western Queens, which began on the night of July 17.

''I have directed staff to meticulously go through the events of last week to determine whether the company's actions and response were appropriate, and whether the current infrastructure, operating, design, maintenance and investment practices must be changed,'' said William M. Flynn, the commission's chairman.

Meanwhile, bracing for a heat wave this weekend, Consolidated Edison and city officials urged residents and businesses in western Queens yesterday to conserve power. Con Edison said it could take three to five months before repairs to the network that serves the affected area are completed.

At a news conference in Queens yesterday morning, Mr. Bloomberg said that ''as the temperatures begin to rise over the next couple days, we run the risk of putting considerable stress on an already fragile'' electric network.

A heat wave, defined as three or more consecutive days with temperatures above 90 degrees, could begin as early as today, according to the National Weather Service, which is forecasting highs in Central Park of 88 degrees today, 90 tomorrow and Saturday, 91 on Sunday and 92 on Monday.

Early yesterday, Con Edison announced that it had restored power to the last of 25,065 customers that were affected by the Queens blackout as of 11:25 p.m. on Tuesday, more than eight days after the start of the blackout. The utility warned that sporadic and isolated failures were still possible in Astoria, Sunnyside, Woodside and Long Island City.

All 22 high-voltage feeder cables that make up the Long Island City network, which serves 115,000 customers in northwestern Queens, were running again, but 600 crews continued to work in round-the-clock shifts to shore up the secondary grid, a tangle of 120-volt cables and transformers that distribute electricity to customers. To ease the load on the bruised network, Con Edison continued using 40 generators to supply electricity to several apartment and office buildings in western Queens.

Each of the 57 underground networks that supply a vast majority of electricity to Queens, Brooklyn, Manhattan and the Bronx is supposed to have enough capacity so that two feeder cables can fail at peak demand without a loss of power to customers. When a feeder cable fails, the load is normally redistributed to the other feeders.

''We are in a weakened state in Long Island City,'' said John F. Miksad, senior vice president for electric operations at Con Edison, who said the network there did not yet meet that standard. ''Our concern is really the secondary grid, these 120-volt cables. Every day we're putting more cable in the ground, changing out more fuses, tightening up the system. But it's going to take us time to get up to 100 percent. Until we're there, I have concerns that we can experience sporadic outages.''

Mr. Miksad said Con Edison was creating a unit of workers dedicated to repairing the Long Island City network. The network had the most feeder-cable failures of any of the underground networks in 2004 and 2005, according to company reports.

Mr. Miksad said of the high failure rate, ''It's one factor, but it is not the whole story.'' He said that the network was one of the largest. ''You've got a lot more components, a lot more sections of cable, a lot more transformers, a lot more connectors,'' he said. ''Obviously, that means you have a lot more things that can fail, just by the law of probability.''

Some Queens residents expressed unease. ''The neighborhood's still shaken, and people aren't confident that we're back at full strength,'' said Marc Attenberg, 37, of Sunnyside. He said that his power came back on Monday morning.

Peak demand in Con Edison's service area, which includes New York City and most of Westchester County, broke the 10,000-megawatt mark in 1988, reached 11,000 in 1997 and 12,000 in 2001, and hit a record of 13,059 on July 27, 2005. Each megawatt can power about 1,000 homes.

For this summer, Con Edison has forecast a peak load of 13,400 megawatts. On July 18, the third and final day of the summer's first heat wave in the city, the peak load was about 12,800 megawatts.

Photos: With Queens barely over its blackout, the power went out yesterday on eastern Staten Island, where a police officer directed traffic at Seaview Avenue and Hylan Boulevard. Right, Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg held a news conference on the island as emergency workers flooded the affected areas. In Queens, Con Ed workers handed out reimbursement claim forms to residents and dispensed advice. (Photographs by Mary DiBiase Blaich for The New York Times); (Photo by Ozier Muhammad/The New York Times)(pg. B1); Mayor Bloomberg tried to reassure Staten Island residents.; Con Edison crews worked at Richmond Road and Raritan Avenue on Staten Island yesterday after electricity went out for 16,000 customers. (Photographs by Mary DiBiase Blaich for The New York Times)(pg. B5)